I’m a Biology student, and I’m about to take a course on zoology, where I have to memorize biological classification trees, which seems a daunting task to me. I can memorize linear information well enough with the Loci system, and I’m using the Major system while I develop my PAO for numbers, so timelines are easy enough, but this sort of hierarchical information has me at a loss.
I’ve been thinking about building some sort of a mind museum (A building for each Phyllum, with a floor for each Class, inside a room for each Order, and an Exhibit for each Family). A route through this museum would be linear and simplify practice, but since it’s hierarchical I could also do ramdom access (Say I need to know all the Orders of insects). Would you think this is a good approach? (Keep in mind I’ll probably need this information all of my life, so I’m willing to do a lot of work on this).
I’ve built “memory museums” before, but nothing quite this ambitious, so I’m not sure if my plan is going to work.
How do YOU memorize hierarchical information? Does anyone have experience with building fictitious mind palaces? Any advice?
I’m a tree enthusiast. I understand that classification of tree is scientific and not based on knowing which kind of mnemonic system would best help to ID a plant. As a result, all books on how to identify trees are weak, according to me. I’m sorry, I do not have a suggestion for you on how to memorize class, phylum, etc. However, if I wanted to write a good book on how to identify trees or how to memorize them, I would do the following.
identify by name all the trees that I want to memorize, say 257.
Divide them into card pack size like groups.
Create suites for those packs such as: trunks, twigs, leaf design, leaf shape, geometry design, tree shape, colors, season best observed, flowers, fruits or even a special ID tests suit (such as smell this part, or cut the leaf to see if it milk).
4)I would try to find which characteristic of a tree would help me the most to identify it and then put that tree in the appropriate suit, creating a nice and visual card of the tree and its best ID characteristic.
I’d find some kind of logical order to the suits with 10 trees per suits. (eg. trunk as the first characteristic, then twigs and then leafs)
Then I would learn to play with the 4 packs of cards that I have created as if they were a regular pack of cards.
That’s just my thought on the subject. If you ever do something like that with North American trees, I would most likely be very interested in getting a copy of your packs!
(Most likely you would need 2 cards for each tree as one characteristic is often not enough to ID it.)
GMS lesson 45 says to memorize hierarchical information this way, essentially create a tree of support images, optionally combined with a loci/Cicero method.
"Visualize an image of a raven. Distinguish three parts of the image: beak, wing, tail.
Connect other images with the distinguished images:
Beak + pencil
Wing + tree
Tail + syringe
Additional images can be distinguished from the images of “pencil”, “tree”, “syringe”:
Pencil – slate-pencil, wood part, eraser;
Tree – top of the tree, stem, root;
Syringe – needle, body, piston.
Images of “slate-pencil”, “wood part”, “eraser”, “top of the tree”, “stem”, “root”, “needle”, “body”, “piston” – can be connected with other images that in turn can be divided into other sub-images.
The method of the parts separation combines perfectly with the Cicero Method. One small structure fixes onto the first support image formed by the Cicero Method; other ramified structure (its first image) fixes onto the second support image, and so on."